Jakob Burckhardt the great historian of the Italian
Renaissance wrote, "Considering individual buildings, there are four or
five cities preceeding Bologna, but it is and remains the most beautiful
Italian city judged as a whole". Leaving Burckhardt with the
responsibility for the superlative, it is certain anyway that his
judgement emphasised a recognizable feature of the city, that is the
beauty of its urban plan. This means that Bologna's
historic centre is not just to be visited for one particular "splendid"
feature in front of which one is "amazed" and then departs. On the
contrary, it is a homogeneous ensemble which has grown through the
centuries by means of contrasts and new syntheses: a unique monument.
Therefore, it seems reasonable to try and explain the story of this
remarkable urban development-which coincides, essentially, with the
economic and political history of the town-especially as we have the
advantage that Bologna has, after Venice, the best preserved historic center in Europe. Therefore our story develops from its origin to the
present day and aims at explaining the various stages of its growth which
has produced a complex of streets, towers, buildings and monasteries, all
of them linked by portico (arcades), a long binding ribbon for a city
which has been defined as "a great basket of terracotta". In fact, with
its thirty five kilometres of porticoes Bologna has the greatest number of
porticoes in the whole world.
In this way Bologna, on this side of the Apennines has become the
anti-Florence. Each town illuminates the other. Florence, which is indeed
an open-air museum of rare works, is counter-balanced in Bologna by the
"atmosphere" which can be found in every single street of our red and grey
urban complex, a city made to be lived in.